‘Castle Rock’ Is The Rare Slow Burn You’ll Want To Binge Twice

If I could give you one piece of television-watching advice right now, it would be to give Hulu’s Castle Rock a try. The Stephen King anthology series sneakily became my favorite show of the summer with a trio of stunning episodes towards the end of the first season’s run. It starts as a slow burn, but its simmer eventually explodes into an incandescent eruption of entertainment. It’s worth the time you put into it.

If I could give you a second piece of advice, it would be to be prepared to want to watch Castle Rock all over again once you’ve binged through it. That’s because Castle Rock is the rare slow burn that might be worth watching twice.

I understand that there’s too much TV to watch. Believe me, I know. It’s now nigh on impossible to keep up with the wide swath of brilliant programming that’s inundating the airwaves and streaming services. What’s worse is that it’s now super common for these trendy new shows to take their sweet time setting everything up. There just doesn’t seem to be enough hours, minutes, or seconds in the day to put up with these slower-than-a-dial-up-modem plot lines. There just isn’t!

Photo: Hulu

When Castle Rock debuted in late July, it was widely considered a good show, but it was shaping up to be one of these frustrating slow burns. My esteemed colleague, Joe Reid, even wrote a piece arguing that it would be better to plow through the first episode of the show just to jump into the plot. Way back in July, this seemed like fine advice. Now that the dust has settled on the season, it’s obvious that every moment in Castle Rock‘s first season counts. Showrunners Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason have built a series that doesn’t just circle in on itself. It meticulously spirals inward like a perfectly constructed nautilus. Stray shots don’t just contain Easter Eggs, but poignant clues that reveal the soul of the show.

As Castle Rock began to heat up — somewhere around Episode 6, where Henry Deaver discovers that his father Matthew was seeking the voice of God in the woods — it became more and more clear that the slow-moving early scenes were full of hefty foreshadowing. As a viewer, I wanted to go back and see how the threads of Episode 7, “The Queen,” slipped through my perception in earlier episodes. By the time I finished Episode 9, “Henry Deaver,” I wanted to go back and watch the entire season from the beginning again. That single episode explained so much that it changed my hard-earned loyalties with a flash.

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Now that Castle Rock‘s first season is over, it feels even more imperative for fans to go back and admire the seeds that were planted from the get-go. Like I said, Castle Rock‘s ending doesn’t just circle back to the beginning; It reframes the whole season as the battle for one man’s soul. Once you understand what the show is working towards, every scene no longer feels like a tiny clue to a mystery, but snapshots of an epic tragedy that can’t be stopped.

Case in point: after wrapping up the season, I’ve gone back to the early minutes of the show’s first episode. What I’m struck by isn’t how clever Castle Rock has been — even though it has been rather ingenious — but how heart-breaking it’s been. Now that we know Alan Pangborn’s fate, Warden Lacy’s choice, and what’s due to happen to all the sorry souls trapped in Castle Rock, the whole story feels like a train wreck we’re watching in painfully elongated time. And like all train wrecks, I’m loathe to look away.